Australia day at Kingston Beach
Filed under: Beaches, Events, Kingston, Blackmans Bay, The Channel and The Huon
Today is Australia day which commemorates the arrival of the First Fleet in Australia in 1788 and is a holiday in all states and territories of Australia. Around the country like here at Kingston Beach there were celebrations to mark the occassion.
The day is controversal with Indigenous Australians who see the date as marking the destruction of their culture and there are annual protests refering to the day as “Invasion Day” and have been campaigning to have the date moved to the day the Government officially apologised for past actions.
Old Bridge
Another shot following on from my post yesterday Officially Empty of the Craigbourne Dam being declared empty. This bridge was formely well under the water but now thanks to the water level dropping to empty the old bridge came out of the depths, kind of like Excalibur only a bridge instead so i guess i can’t be king. The planks are all gone so there is just the beams of the bridge left. I did the balancing act over and back, and i was worrying that despite the beams being thick perhaps years of water would have rotted them and i was going to fall into the water. But i didn’t!
One thing that i forgot to mention in case a local reader decides to visit, do not drive even remotely close to the edge as while it is dry on the surface, you will get bogged.
Officially Empty
In the news this week was the announcement that the Craigbourne Dam was officially empty. A little over 11 months ago i visited the area and at that time the dam level was at 10% of capacity. Thanks to another year of drought the water level dropped and is now empty. As the water leveldropped it exposed the original water course of the river, an old bridge and plants, all of which were drowned when the dam was built. When i was there today the water wasn’t flowing at all. It was kind of surreal seeing stuff that had for so long been under water.
The area has now that i look back provided a number of photos that i have published here including the shot from february 2008, Cracked Earth, Hat, Rust, Reel and Metal.
This post is also significant as it is one of the few times thanks to the 200km between the areas that i include for this blog and my other daily photoblog Bicheno Daily that I have posted pictures from both areas taken on the same day.
Under the Bridge
A ship sailing under the Tasman Bridge on the way to the wharf at the Nystar wharf at the Zinc Works
Boathouses at Taroona
Today’s picture, boathouses at Taroona. Today’s weather wasn’t good for boating with gale force winds and the third strongest gust of wind since it started being measured here in Hobart in 1944 at 124 km/. If you had of been on top of Mt Wellington then it would have been gusts of up to 150 km/h!
Elsewhere thanks to the weather several national parks were closed to bushwalkers, lanes were closed on the Tasman Bridge and some bushfires broke out at various places in the state. A dust storm also blew over the city several times but i didn’t get the chance to photograph it.